Replication Data for: Comparing ‘responsible party government’ in the US and the UK

Responsible parties are conventionally defined as those capable of announcing their legislative goals and then passing them on the strength of their own members’ votes. In this paper, I consider why UK majority parties have closely approximated these conditions for responsibility since the 1880s, while US majority parties have never approximated them closely. I provide the first systematic evidence on when the British opposition began to offer across-the-board opposition to the government’s agenda and when the government became able to pass bills using only its own members’ votes. I also explore the role that leaders’ control of the legislative agenda and their followers’ nominations played in these developments. I attribute US parties’ inability to mimic their British counterparts to different costs of defending bill passage coalitions against “weakest-link” attacks.

责任政党的传统定义为：能够宣布自身立法目标，并凭借本党议员的投票支持通过相关立法的政党。本文旨在探讨：为何自19世纪80年代以来，英国多数党始终近乎满足责任政党的判定条件，而美国多数党却从未接近这一标准。本文首次提供系统性实证证据，厘清了英国反对党何时开始对政府议程发起全面反对，以及英国政府何时能够仅依靠本党议员的投票通过法案。本文同时探讨了政党领袖对立法议程的掌控权，以及其对本党议员提名权的把控，在上述立法格局演变进程中所发挥的作用。本文将美国政党无法效仿英国同行的根源，归结为二者在为法案通过联盟抵御“最弱一环”（weakest-link）攻击时所需承担的成本存在差异。